LFG and the Death Spiral Effect

Please forgive the melodramatic title, but after attempting 4 trials today through the new LFG interface I've made some observations. In a nutshell, half-sized leagues this soon after release seem almost destined to fail.

What happens is the LFG queue starts up a trial as soon as the minimum size league is achieved. They start working on the task, but almost inevitably people start to die, for several reasons. 1) This is new content, and people don't know it yet, 2) Nobody has any Incarnate abilities beyond Alpha yet, and 3) They're running it with the minimum team size. The first two problems will eventually sort themselves out, the last won't without adjustment from the devs.

After a few deaths, people start to quit. They seem (anecdotally) to be quitting more than in normal taskforces actually, which I find kind of distressing... pure conjecture here, but I wonder if the fact that a computer rather than a person put the team together lessens peoples' sense of responsibility? Anyway, that's a side track.

The result of people quitting isn't as clear as it would be in a taskforce - in a TF if the team drops below a certain threshold people at least see the problem. With LFG leagues, when people drop out they're replaced with new folks. Folks who don't know what's going on, and because they weren't there from the start probably have an even lower sense of group responsibility. Once one of these trials starts to go downhill I've seen quite rapid turnover at times, folks basically just popping in to look around and leaving. This is obviously bad for the trial, but IMHO this sort of mercenary attitude is also bad for the community.

If I had to propose a solution, the easiest would be to give people an option when joining the LFG queue of whether they'd prefer a full (or nearly full) team, or the minimum size. I personally would prefer to not start out short-handed when the content is new. I'd much rather wait in queue longer to have a decent chance at success.

Another possible thing to look at is the algorithm for assigning people who join tasks in progress - purely anecdotal, but I haven't yet seen new members popping into my leagues until after people start quitting. This tells me that the computer's probably assigning people to the leagues with the least members first, which means in most cases those half-sized leagues it starts you out with will never get bigger, because the leagues that are circling the drain will gobble up the new recruits in their death throes.

I'm certainly not writing this in any sort of rage, and I'm not claiming that my experiences are universal. I have high hopes for the LFG system, but my initial experiences with it in a live server environment leave me concerned.

p.s. Actually I decided to check to make sure this topic wasn't redundant, and apparently the learned sage Zombie Man noted this problem (and proposed a solution) on page 1 of the beta feedback thread - I guess my foresight wasn't so keen. Given that, I guess the purpose of this post is simply to point out that I see it happening in-game, repeatedly, not just in theory.

It was discussed in beta, so your concerns are very real. The problem is that the LFG tool, in my opinion, should be useful for all types of players. But, it appears that there may be a stigma attached to using it, which causes a negative feedback loop. The more players quit, the more new players come into a situation unaware, and so it spirals out of control as you eloquently explained it.

In practice on a lower population server, this tool is not working well at all.

The best case scenario for a soloist queued up is the following: a pocket D or RWZ league forms and leaves one or two slots open. These are then filled by soloists queued up. An attentive league leader will then need move these players over into one of the almost full teams so as to not hamper the team based buffs that the player may offer or the rate of experience and thread gain.

Another thing that seems off about this in the live setting are the times that the queues report are wildly inaccurate. It seems that the queue is maybe getting data from the server about how often any given trial is launching. Unfortunately, since most leagues are forming currently via social recruiting in the above stated zones and on server specific global channels, most trials are starting with full leagues. So a new trial maybe starting roughly every four or three minutes but that doesn't mean that someone queued up solo or on a small team will quickly find their way to an event. Instead, I've heard many people frustrated joining a league socially after queueing and waiting 15-20 minutes with no results even when estimated start times are ranging from 3-5 minutes.

Lastly, the toggle for "join event in progress" as well as the "rejoin your event" button after crashing out both seem to be doing nothing on the live setting.